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Enjoyable week in Madrid, visiting with students and faculty in our joint executive LLM program with IE. I co-taught two classes with The Hon. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit. The program is an excellent opportunity for students around the world to get an intense education in law & business.

Here are pictures of students and Prof. Jim Lupo, in class and at a dinner held at the Real Madrid soccer stadium.

Visiting this week in Madrid with our partner law school, IE, with whom with have a joint LLM program focusing on international business law. In addition to co-teaching with Judge Margaret McKeown of the United States Court of Appeals, I will be joining with the students of our program, a diverse cohort from many continents and countries.

The IE program, like our programs in Tel Aviv and Seoul, is run on an executive format and gives students the opportunity to learn from top professors (from Northwestern and the host schools) and develop focused expertise on subjects valuable to future legal (and business) careers in which exposure to American and international legal concepts, principles, and doctrines are increasingly important.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel presented Tina Tchen with the Dawn Clark Netsch Public Service Award; your faithful blogger is there on the right.

Todd Belcore (JD ’10) and Cindy Wilson (JD ’86)

The Emerging Leader Award was presented to Todd Belcore by Cindy Wilson, Clinical Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Externships.

Tom Geraghty (JD ’69), Cynthia Kobel, and Walter Bell (JD ’71)

The Dean’s Partnership Award was presented to the Kenneth F. and Harle G. Montgomery Foundation. Pictured here: Tom Geraghty, Professor and Director of the Bluhm Legal Clinic, with Cynthia Kobel and Walter Bell, who accepted the award on behalf of the foundation.

It was a great event – thanks to everyone who joined us for the celebration, and to our award winners, for all they do for Northwestern Law.

Motion to Lead: The Campaign for Northwestern Law will raise $150 million for financial aid, curricular innovation, law-business-technology programs, social justice initiatives, the Bluhm Legal Clinic, global projects, and the new Center for Practice Engagement & Innovation. This campaign will build the philanthropic support that will enable us—with creativity, energy, and innovative thinking—to address the challenges facing legal education. These challenges are inextricably bound up with the future of the legal profession, and how we prepare our students for that future. Our students have high expectations of us, as they should. We are taking bold steps to meet and exceed these expectations. This campaign is an example: it is the largest fundraising campaign in the school’s history. We have already raised $67 million toward our very ambitious goal. (To put that in historical context, our last campaign raised a total of $78 million.) Developing the resources that will enable us to leverage our existing assets and create new ones is an essential obligation because in the future it will not be enough to be merely excellent. In the future, the best law schools will be different in ways that make a difference. And that is our plan.

In the coming weeks, I’ll discuss more—much more—about the specifics of the campaign and the Law School’s strategic plan on this blog. I look forward to sharing that with you.

Building on the “specialization” posts I referenced recently, another interesting post by Prof. Campbell of Peking Law. How can I not agree with his analysis when he references Northwestern Law’s admissions process in particular?

I certainly associate myself with his observations about the role and pertinence of these key lawyer competencies. Where I might quibble just a bit in his observation, referencing NYU in particular (although he might as well have referenced other law schools, including ours), that there is limited value added by the work within law school to develop these competencies. I do believe there is more value that meets the eye. Emphasis on developing business skills is growing and I think that is a fruitful development indeed.

My colleague, Leigh Buchanan Bienen, who is first and foremost an expert on (and agitator for) capital punishment reform, just published a book about Florence Kelley—labor activist, political reformer, and 1895 Northwestern Law alumna. Kelley’s tireless efforts to reform labor laws, particularly for women and children, had a profound impact on working in the United States.

Florence Kelley and the Children: Factory Inspector in 1890s Chicago, focuses on Kelley’s life in Chicago in the 1890s, during which time she served as Chief Factory Inspector for the State of Illinois. A woman in a job like that was all but unheard of in those days, but so was a woman earning a law degree. Kelley put her legal education to good use in her lifelong efforts to change labor laws. She battled legislation challenging the Illinois factory inspection law all the way to the Supreme Court, and won. She was one of the contributors to the 1908 Brandeis Brief, which combined legal argument with scientific evidence and changed American jurisprudence forever, and she worked on other labor-law cases heard by the nation’s highest court. She was an appellate rock star in an age when women couldn’t vote.

The book is more than a just a history, though. Using biographical elements from her own life and work, Leigh draws interesting parallels between the struggles of the labor movement of the late 19th century and the events that led to the end of capital punishment in Illinois just a few years ago. Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here, describes the book in this way: “In these pages, Leigh Bienen offers a worthy tribute to Kelley and draws intriguing parallels to the struggles of today.”